Hunter Biden calls for LAPTOP market makers to buy back and burn tokens

Hunter Biden has a request for the trading firms behind his memecoin’s launch: buy back the excess tokens and burn them.

The call follows a forensic review commissioned after $LAPTOP’s September debut. The review ties the token’s wild opening swings to thin liquidity and market-making missteps, and it found that some of those market makers walked away with sizable gains.

From launch to forensic review

$LAPTOP went live on September 9, 2026, on Base, the Ethereum layer-2 network built by Coinbase. The token launched with a supply of 1 billion units and a starting price of approximately $0.05.

Things moved fast. The price shot up almost immediately, and for a moment the token’s fully diluted valuation sat somewhere between $144 billion and $317 billion.

The spike did not last. $LAPTOP fell 98% to 99% within hours, a drop driven largely by how little liquidity was backing the market. By early October 2026, the token had settled around $0.079.

On October 7, 2026, Groom Lake published an independent forensic review of the launch. Its central finding concerned one market maker that contributed only about $5,200 in liquidity, a figure the review put at less than 0.003% of the total supply.

The review also documented who benefited. One market-making firm earned approximately $686,000, while another collected more than $2.1 million shortly after the price peaked. Together, those two firms booked nearly $3 million in the immediate aftermath.

Biden’s response and the burn request

Market makers identified in connection with the launch include G20, GSR, and Wintermute. Biden is calling on these firms to buy back and burn the excess tokens they hold.

Biden has also pushed back on criticism directed at him personally. He said he had no connection to the sell-offs and pointed to the founder allocation as evidence.

That allocation equals 30% of the total supply. According to Biden, those tokens are locked for six months, then vest gradually over the following 24 months, and they have not moved.

He also said he plans to burn most of the unclaimed tokens from the project’s first airdrop tranche during the week of October 7, 2026.

The anti-Trump-coin pitch

$LAPTOP has been marketed as having “opposite tokenomics” to the memecoins associated with the Trump family.

The structure breaks down into a few major buckets. Insiders hold 30%, which the project frames as a comparatively lower allocation for founders.

Another 20% is set aside for targeted airdrops aimed at traders who lost money on the $TRUMP token.

A further 30% sits in a pool tied to prediction markets. That pool is earmarked for prediction-linked burns or charitable contributions.

What this means for traders and market makers

A contribution of about $5,200 against a token that briefly implied a valuation in the hundreds of billions shows the mismatch plainly. Retail buyers saw a price chart. They did not see how shallow the pool underneath it was.

For market-making firms, the fallout is reputational. Biden’s public burn request turns what is usually a private contractual relationship into a public accountability question. G20, GSR, and Wintermute now face pressure to respond, even though the review frames the problem as missteps rather than deliberate wrongdoing.

The founder tokens unlock after six months and vest over two years, so the credibility of the “opposite tokenomics” pitch will be tested well after the launch-day headlines fade.